The Story
VOX Presents "Jane: Abortion and the Underground"
"Jane: Abortion and the Underground" takes place before Roe v. Wade was passed. Courtesy of VOX.
VOX (Voices for Planned Parenthood) will be taking the stage this weekend with their play “Jane: Abortion and Underground,” which tells the story of “Jane,” an underground abortion referral service that was active in the Chicago area before 1973. The play speaks to the sacrifices, pain and bravery of women who have fought for the right to control what happens to their bodies and lives.
The play’s script comes from real interviews with the women of The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU), which was the unofficial parent organization of “Jane.” They helped women find illegal abortionists in the Chicago area and eventually had to start performing the procedures themselves due to “doctors” who were known for sexual harassment, drinking during surgery and charging ridiculous fees.
“The story is about their experiences as activists, friends, abortionists, mothers and prisoners of the state,” said student directors Morgan Berman, ’08, and Danielle Garrett, ’08. “It has become too common for people of our generation to take things like the birth control pill, abortion and now emergency contraception for granted. ‘Jane’ is a reminder and a call to action.”
“Jane” is supposed to help send the message to advocate for comprehensive sexual education, access to reproductive health care and contraception.
“The message we hope to send through ‘Jane’ is that making abortion illegal will not accomplish that goal (reducing the number of abortions) - it will only make abortion unsafe and therefore threaten women’s health and autonomy,” said VOX President Devan Barber, ’08.
“We are supposed to learn from the lessons they learned, that life is a complicated concept and we have a responsibility to each other to support everyone in their choices,” Berman and Garrett said. “We should also take heed that the circumstances they faced are not so different from our own and that we have a lot more work to do before we can say every child born in this country is a wanted child and that all women, men and families have the resources they need to control their fertility and health.”
“Jane” is one of several plays presented in the past few years by VOX. Others include “CHOICES” and “The Vagina Monologues,” which were both huge successes. These plays also helped promote reproductive rights, health care and pro-choice out to young people who make choices about those issues.
“The casts have talked about gaining new and more nuanced understandings of what pro-choice means, both as a movement and to them personally,” said Berman and Garrett. “We hope people will continue to come away from our shows feeling empowered, informed and ready to get involved.”
“Jane” is far from a typical student play. “It is real. It’s true and reality is always more complicated than a convenient binary,” said Berman and Garrett.
“We wanted to do this play because young adults our age tend to take the rights we have for granted,” said Barber. “The play, we feel, helps to move the abortion debate away from ‘pro-choice’ versus ‘anti-abortion’ to a discussion about women’s health and safety and good public policy. Because ‘Jane’ shows the horrific consequences of illegal abortion, we hope to remind students how precious the right to choose is, and motivate people to become more active in the fight to protect that right.”
“Jane: Abortion and the Underground” runs Nov. 17 and 18 at 7 p.m. in Ewell Recital Hall.